Is it enough? Not yet. For each monitor you can establish thresholds for availability and health, and have special actions taken, including sending messages to speficied e-mail addresses (great for SMS!).

The insight you learn on your company's systems utilisation is great. You can see performance and monitors charts for a specified period, and even determine how long this data will be stored.

The ManageEngine Applications Manager comes in a Professional Edition and a Free Edition. Yes, free as in gratis. The free edition does not allow user management and gives you five monitors (albeit this was reduced from previous versions where the number of free monitors was 10). You can see how I am using the free edition with my two servers here and happy with it.

It communicates to other servers via SNMP or WMI, and for some database operations it will need the admin password. For this reason I suggest you use a VPN to communication between servers. Check my previous post on Hamachi, a great tool, easy to configure, that can be used for this (I am using it now).

It will use some resources though. The install process is painless, but prepare to have TOMCat, Apache and the ManageEngine installed. I suggest you change the Apache service to Automatic to allow you to see the tool from other computers without need to login to the server, and I also suggest you have the latest Java run time.

The company behind this application has a lot of other tools available, for all sorts of IT tasks. But what's interesting is that they are also behind of the Zoho set of web-based office tools (think of word processing, presentation, collaboration, spreadsheet, CRM, project management).